


In the Garden of the Ancients(Sequel to Hardwired) by iiiieyes

by iiiionly (Tanis)



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: I've taken great liberties with what little canon we have about ascension in this story.'>In the
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 07:11:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12127233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanis/pseuds/iiiionly
Summary: The nightmare Daniel suffers inHardwiredhas returned, but with a new twist.  Due to that etheric thread the team finds with Daniel in the previous story, some things Colonel O'Neill would have preferred stay buried come back to haunt him and the rest of his team.





	In the Garden of the Ancients(Sequel to Hardwired) by iiiieyes

**Author's Note:**

> Imported from the AlphaGate

  
In the Garden of the Ancients(Sequel to Hardwired) by iiiieyes

 

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[In the Garden of the Ancients(Sequel to Hardwired)](http://www.thealphagate.com/viewstory.php?sid=3958) by [iiiieyes](http://www.thealphagate.com/viewuser.php?uid=277)  


  
Summary: The nightmare Daniel suffers in _Hardwired_ has returned, but with a new twist. Due to that etheric thread the team finds with Daniel in the previous story, some things Colonel O'Neill would have preferred stay buried come back to haunt him and the rest of his team.  
Warnings: I've taken great liberties with what little canon we have about ascension in this story.  
Categories: [General](http://www.thealphagate.com/browse.php?type=categories&catid=1) Characters:  Daniel Jackson, Jack O'Neill, Other, Samantha Carter, Teal'c  
Genres:  Angst, Character Study, Drama, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene/Episode-Related, Team  
Warnings:  Language, Sexual Situations  
Challenges:  
Series: None  
Chapters:  1 Completed: Yes   
Word count: 19345 Read: 4076  
Published: 30 Aug 2009 Updated: 30 Aug 2009 

Chapter 1 by iiiieyes

In The Garden of the Ancients

  


_When the mind is free, the body is no longer required…_

 

 

 

_Cycles of searing heat … stinging sweat pouring into open wounds … chasers of glacial cold a mountain of warm blankets can’t combat … tiny pulsing shocks randomly attacking nerve endings, twitching a toe, a finger, an elbow indiscriminately, just behind a strike force of sharp, spasming pains spawning tidal waves of nausea … layers of flesh slough off like orange rind … tissue stripped of membrane presses against gauze barely sustaining the integrity of the organism frantically trying to preserve fading life force … collapsing veins bleed out, disintegrating inside muscle and sinew decaying faster than a sun-rotted corpse … nerve endings begin to deteriorate … until finally, as pain receptors melt away, blood mutates to viscous fluid, leaving the sensation of floating in a hot sea, cradled in the stygian heat that is birth and death._

Trapped, heart pounding, Jack instinctively flung out an arm in an effort to free them both from the ensnaring nightmare. Except his arm flopped uselessly, muscles responding only lackadaisically to the urgent command to seize and shake. Grunting with the effort, he rolled to his side. Ignoring the debilitating weakness, he shoved himself up enough to drag the inert form of his best friend across his knees, sleeping bag and all. "Wake up," he wheezed…in his best command voice.

Groping hands met stone-cold flesh. "Wake up!” Jack flung an arm around the abruptly upright archaeologist as the thick skull smashed painfully against his collarbone, the collaborative impact whooshing air out of both sets of lungs. “Ooomph!”

“Déjà vu'," he muttered. “Oh for cryin’ out loud, Daniel! “ Jack tried to massage his shoulder around the armful of archaeologist. “Are we ever gonna be done with this friggin’ routine?”

Like certain Goa’uld SG-1 had presumed dead, this damn nightmare kept coming back to life. Whether the spill of memories while on Anbuis’ ship had triggered some new release mechanism, or the universe just enjoyed messing with Daniel, his subconscious was churning through his personal smorgasbord of deaths as though trying to decide which might be its favorite. The Kelownan Calamity, as Jack had begun referring to it, was getting the most air play. It seemed to be cycling through about every third night again.

Daniel crashed consciousness with the force of a mother ship hurtling towards an uncontrolled entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The tent spun upside down, slammed into reverse, and tilt-a-whirled in the opposite direction. The only thing anchoring him to the floor…the walls, the ceiling… and finally the floor again…was the iron band clamped around his chest.

For a moment his panicked brain refused to process the urgent messages bungling around his neural net. Nothing responded; vocal chords were petrified like eons old fossils, fingers crooked like Edward Sissorhands, elbows frozen like Aiyana’s in the ice. A sharp smack between his shoulder blades reengaged autonomic systems, so he sucked in life-sustaining oxygen. It sparkled in his blood stream, setting off rounds of upside down fireworks inside his still gyrating head.

"Well that was fun." There was a momentary pause, followed by a mumbled, "Not." And then, "You damn well better be awake now," in his ear.

Awareness trembled on the cusp of consciousness, constricting every lax muscle as it tumbled, slowly at first, then faster and faster, head over heels down the slope of cognition. Hard on the heels of cognition, came acute sensory overload. Daniel shoved frantically at the anchoring arm, winning instant release and, sequentially, a nose dive to the tent floor.

Oh yeah, he was wide awake, though his body remained trapped in a cellular level imprint of the nightmare. The raging inferno continued, breeding ground for cell division, host to a foreign matter still liquefying the very marrow of his bones.

Rather than try and rise again, Daniel rolled to his side and curled into a ball inside his sleeping bag. His harsh panting bounced around the inside of the tent, making it sound like a platoon of boot camp recruits inhabited the two-man space. God, he was a mess; unfit for anything but a straight jacket at the moment. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to outwit the nausea ferreting its way up his throat, furtively looking to hook up with the dizziness lurking behind his eyeballs.

Insanity skulked around every corner.

“Talk to me, Daniel.” Jack’s voice was insistent and grounding.

Insanity lurched for cover.

“C-c-c-old,” the linguist stuttered, trying to wrap his tongue around something intellectually rousing, like – _I’m fine._

Jack rolled to his knees, patting the floor in search of the flashlight he always kept by his head. It was pitch black in the tent, courtesy of the alien purple sky.

His space blanket was exactly where he always kept it; right side of his pack, near the top, for easy access in an emergency.

He’d pulled up Daniel’s pack too, but had to root through what felt like a entire drugstore’s worth of chocolate bars, several small plastic barrels he finally realized contained memory cards for the camera, a couple pairs of socks he hoped were clean, a rolled up pair of BDUs, a t-shirt and two heavy tomes, before his questing fingers closed around the space blanket at the bottom of it.

In the act of pulling it out, he changed his mind and diverted to his own sleeping bag, unzipping the more substantial weight to spread its bulk over his civilian teammate. The space blankets were great if you were freezing to death, but lacked the comfort of being wrapped up in one of granny’s heavy old quilts. At the moment, Daniel needed both warmth and comfort.

Mission accomplished, he appropriated a pack for a pillow and lay back down on his side, carefully feeding bits of endurance into that weird, psycho thing they all shared.

Carter and Teal’c were there instantly, subtly seconding him. The team effort was rewarded by an immediate lessening of the body wracking shivers, followed by a fractional relaxation of the stiff shoulders and an involuntary sigh from Daniel.

Under normal circumstances Teal’c would never have breached the confidential nature of the sacred meditative relationship he shared with the scholar. Recently, however, he had imparted, with extreme reluctance, his discovery that he could influence Daniel’s physical condition in times of extreme duress.

A little judicious provocation had overcome even Jack’s skepticism of all things of an arcane or esoteric nature. And with perseverance, he had learned to finesse the link nearly as well as Carter. Who, naturally enough, had taken to it like a duck to water. But then she talked to her plants.

Of course, Jack was certain, if Daniel ever caught on, he’d hack off their limbs inch by inch and gouge out their eyeballs.

Daniel, however, was well aware the warmth flowing into his frozen extremities was coming from his teammates. He and Teal’c had briefly flirted with theosophical ideology during some of their meditation sessions, with the Jaffa warrior grounding Daniel’s attempts to reach the astral plane. The experiments had strengthened not only the scholar’s etheric thread of trust, but his understanding of how the psychic link could be influenced – for good or ill.

On an instinctive level, he knew his team formed the bedrock of his foundation; they would never cause, or allow, harm to come to him, even at the cost of their own lives. But acceptance of that level of trust required an equal level of exposure, and vulnerability on that scale was still difficult to maintain.

Optimistically, some part of him expected that one day he would hold them accountable for depleting their own resources to bolster his. And while hacking off limbs and gouging out eyeballs occasionally made for excellent diversionary thoughts, he liked to think he had more finesse than simple hacking and gouging demanded.

Daniel stretched his fingers experimentally, concentrating on the individual threads spliced into the lifeline connecting him to his family. It took his mind off the lingering phantom pain that plagued him, often for hours, after a nightmare.

The memory ghosting at the edges of consciousness bore Sam’s imprint. It was one of her favorites and always came up in any conversation of their top ten off world places. The recollection unfurled with the gentleness of a water lily responding to the caress of the sun’s warmth, flowering fully as he allowed it to extract the last tentacles of nightmare still sunk deep into his brain. Sam had a gift for redirecting his hamster wheel cogitations.

The cold dialing program had designated the planet’s binary code as P2X-131. It had been a bust in terms of any military interest; no particular minerals, ores, or other valuable natural resources. No honkin’ big space guns, not even any itty bitty signs of civilization past or present.

What they’d found instead was a veritable Garden of Eden.

Though the planet boasted a Stargate, no carbon footprint had marred the delicate ecosystem, indicating, both scientists had breathed with something akin to religious fervor, abandonment millennia ago. Whatever disaster, natural or otherwise, had caused the desertion, the planet had long since re-evolved its innate balance.

Aerial survey underway, samples taken, recon completed, they’d received permission to camp for the night, after inferring the need for further recon based on yet-to-be-determined aerial info. They had hiked back across the floor of a towering ochre canyon to an area of falls and natural hot springs that had made the most expensive Earth spa appear to be from the Stone Age in comparison. The hot springs and cold falls had been irresistibly enchanting. Best of all, they’d found no serpents, Goa’uld or otherwise, lurking in the garden.

Daniel eased his aching limbs out of their fetal position, stretching tentatively. Yep, he could distinguish Jack’s egregious attempts at subtlety and sense Teal’c’s fine tuned finessing. Somehow, he had to learn to kink the link if he was going to make any progress with his assignment here on Kheb.

Jack sat up to exchange the pack under his head. In the darkness, he’d pulled up Daniel’s knobby backpack. His own was slightly squishier, since he kept only essential spare clothing and MREs in it. He was still feeling slightly nauseated himself, which meant Daniel must be swimming in it yet.

It had been bad enough when they'd only been experiencing Daniel's panic; this was twenty-first century _Nightmare Theater_ podcasting in full _IMAX_ presentation. Being hardwired into someone else's brain was proving damned inconvenient - and a tad bit creepy.

The doc had informed them the trauma around a fatal event would likely render conscious memory implausible, if not impossible. She’d said the human mind lacked the capacity to process the sheer volume of data feeding into the main frame. All circuits would be channeling effort into sustaining life, not worrying about storing up memories for the afterlife.

Daniel, being the exception to every rule, was naturally in full possession of every last detail, down to the putrid smell of degrading human flesh. Thanks to his _IMAX_ nightmares, that stench lingered pervasively.

Jack inhaled deeply, overwriting his olfactory senses with the smell of smoke from their sentry fire. It was embedded with the tang of fresh cedar emanating from the tall sentinels surrounding the temple gardens where they were camped.

“How do we find the kill switch for this again?” he asked quietly, well aware his companion was still wide awake.

The scent of deep night and nocturnal-blooming flora perfumed the air as well.

Daniel grunted and shifted to a more comfortable position, tucking his cold hands into the folds of the sleeping bag that smelled of Jack. Unconsciously mimicking his team leader, he inhaled deeply as well, overwriting _his_ olfactory senses with the fragrance of home and sanctuary.

The backs of questing fingers touched his cheek lightly, then brushed through his sweaty hair. “Feeling any better?”

“Yeah.” Nominally, but _any_ better was good.

The fingers slid around the back of his neck, applying very slight, almost questioning pressure. Daniel’s relieved sigh was muffled against Jack’s chest. In the aftermath of these nightmares, he was beyond caring, and accepted gratefully, the freely offered comfort when the sensory overload thing settled enough for him to be able to.

It was the one thing Jack had always given unconditionally, even during that last year when they’d argued constantly. Every touch was imbued with layers of short hand that spoke volumes. The man gave the gift of human contact so easily and freely, it often caught Daniel off guard. And a part of him, the tiny slice of deprived child still hiding in a dark corner of his mind, soaked up the physical communication like a sponge.

On the floor of a tent, light years from Earth, in the deepest dark of the night, he gave his sanity into Jack’s keeping and knew it would be well cared for.

The only sound now was the whisper of calloused hands over taut fabric stretched across broad shoulders. Eventually the trembling eased, the rapid heartbeat decelerated and viability stole back into the extremities.

Jack let go with a causal hair ruffle when Daniel stirred and flexed his shoulders, sloughing off the sleeping bag as too warm.  
  
Silence loitered like a homeless person, comfortably relaxed in the trappings of the night. Jack rearranged his sleeping bag and lay down on top of it, the pack once again serving as a pillow.

This mission had its roots in the Kelowna-by-way-of-Vis Uban-courtesy-of-Anubis-barely-made-it-out-alive debrief two weeks ago. Where Teal’c, in the middle of Daniel’s announcement that Anubis might still be in existence, had interrupted with a mention of Kheb.

That lovely planet where they’d met – oh yeah – Oma DeSala. And – _oh yeah_ – stumbled on that temple where Daniel had found the instruction book on how to ascend.

Jack hadn’t been too keen about a trip back here. It sounded too much like a TV infomercial. How to Ascend in Five Easy Steps. Call now and we’ll include, not just the manual, but the companion testimony book from folks who’ve already done it. Have your credit card ready and call toll-free 1-800-ASCENDMENOW.

Naturally, what had begun life as an information gathering, see-what-you-can-find-out-about-half-ascended-Goa’ulds assignment, with a sort of vacation atmosphere, since only Daniel, out of SG-1, was actually working, had turned into something else.

Surprise!

Not.

Like that marvelous toy, Daniel zipped when he moved, bopped when he stopped, and whirred when he stood still. He was contemplating something, and while Jack wasn’t absolutely certain what it was, he had a strong suspicion.

It worried him. A lot.

They’d been on Kheb three days; officially they had four left. Hammond had informed Jack, their timing was discretionary and could be added to if needed. If not needed, SG-1was at liberty to use the additional time recreationally if they wished too.

Jack did not wish to; he wanted off this planet yesterday. Especially if his niggling suspicion was even close to accurate.

An hour of staring at the tent ceiling, even through the backs of his eyelids, was more than enough. Jack sat up. “Fraiser--”

“Yeah.” Daniel rolled to his knees. While joints were no longer locked in agony, the aftermath, as always, lingered in his nerve endings. Every joint and muscle still felt stiff and sore.

“Daniel?”

Crouched half in and half out of the tent, Daniel stopped. It was useless, in the dark, to look back, but he turned his head anyway.

“What if we slept by the fire? Would it make a difference?”

Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know.” He slipped out of the tent and padded quietly toward the M.A.L.P.

Sam, her P-90 swagged over the back of her shoulder, met him where light and darkness merged, sliding her arms around his waist to hug him tightly. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m good. Sorry,” he offered quietly, returning the affectionate hug with equal warmth. “I wish I could figure out what to do about this.”

There - he could lay the ground work for expectations - and when he did discover how to tie a knot in the etheric cord, maybe they’d be less inclined to panic. _Yeah, and hope springs eternal,_ he thought, channeling Jack without even trying.

While he could shape words into weapons, outright misrepresentation of the truth had never come naturally. He could shade it, color it, even twist it slightly, but when it came to out-and-out lying, he had a great deal of difficulty.

Stifling the sigh the thought incited, he let her go and moved toward the M.A.L.P. “I’m under orders to take a sleeping pill.” Only a slight misrepresentation of the truth; it would have come down to that if he’d balked, but he hadn’t argued because he knew if he didn’t sleep, no one else would either.

“I have coffee brewing. I’ll get you some.”

In the time it took to find an LED penlight and sift through the contents of the med pack for the prescription bottle of pills that had managed to work its way to the bottom, the fire had attracted a quartet of sleeping bags. Sam was sliding into hers, having handed off the watch to Teal’c. Jack’s slumbering profile was cast in fire flung shadows and a cup of coffee waited at the foot of the sleeping bag spread between Jack and Sam. Teal’c’s bag was laid out on the other side of Sam’s.

Daniel picked up the coffee cup, settling with it on a log near Teal’c, thinking it was good to be home again, even if turned out to be only for a visit.

The coffee was black and strong, with just enough sugar to expiate the bitterness. Too bad the sleeping pills would negate the beneficial effects of caffeine.

“Danieljackson.”

Daniel forced his eyes open, turning his head toward the Jaffa. “What?”

“Would it not be more comfortable to sleep in a prone position?” Setting aside his staff weapon, Teal’c plucked the sagging cup from between the archaeologist’s knees and slid a hand under his elbow, drawing him to his feet.

“Rather not sleep,” Daniel mumbled, squinting down at his bare toes. He turned though, directed by the phantom hand at his elbow, and shuffled around the perimeter of the fire toward the empty sleeping bag between the slumbering forms of his teammates. This sighing thing _must_ be an old habit, he decided, slithering into the bag. Surely it couldn’t have developed so fully in the few short weeks he’d been home. Between one sigh and the next, he was asleep.

Teal'c returned to his spot and settled his mind to a light state of kel'no'rem, sending his senses out on reconnaissance. Overhead, the purple sky fingered the other side of dawn and sang of Jaffa heroes whose souls had found their way home.

Kheb's temple grounds had been hewn out of the center of the forested floor of the valley. The Stargate had been set nearly twenty klicks distant from the temple itself, in the foothills of the mountains rimming the bowl of sacred space. Despite the swift and unexpected violence he’d witnessed in the temple courtyard four years ago, his reconnaissance now encountered no lingering imprint of the fear he often sensed in places like this. Perhaps because the assault had been merely the destruction of evil - without anger, lacking a retributive quality - it had not desecrated the tranquility of this holy place.

An owl hooted, long and low. The shadow of a branch danced briefly as a feathered tenant shifted and raised its head from under a wing, woken by the voice of the owl. Fallen leaves rustled on the forest floor where tiny nocturnal rodents scuttled for the safety of earthen homes as silent wings caressed the night.

As it had for Bra'tac, the reality of Kheb had heightened Teal'c's awareness of the swift passage of time. Unlike the old man, he did not yet feel its cutting edge, though the loss of strength caused by the removal of the evil within had affected him more deeply than he'd ever imagined. Tonight though, the absence was a triumph rather than a loss. Knowledge and intuition married up here, birthing the reality of an existence beyond this mortal life that called to him with a siren’s voice.

"In time," he returned silently, "I will sing your song."

Behind him the fire snapped as a log broke open, pouring a pocket of pitch into the embers. Flames stretched to lick hungrily at infinity, sending up investigative sparks that streaked like tiny ha'taks into the stratosphere, only to plummet earthward without having touched the stars.

Teal'c drifted deeper into ke'no'reem. His conscious mind was alert and prepared should danger threaten, though they kept a watch out of habit more than necessity. Whether the protection lay in the temple, or the planet itself, it was a haven, intended and kept as a sanctuary for any seekers of aid.

An hour passed … two … the watch should have passed to O’Neill. Teal’c chose not wake him. While the tretonin might not match his symbiote’s endowment of physical strength, it did keep him in peak physical condition. His three human companions were showing signs of deep fatigue and he still required far less sleep to maintain optimal core reaction.

The first quiet steps plucked at his consciousness as though a night born breeze drifted past, thin soles pricking no other senses beyond intuition. Teal'c glanced over his shoulder at his sleeping companions.

_Muscle and sinew pinioned and quivering with cellular-level intuition … the reek of fiber and flesh agonizingly melded … crippling exposure as layers of psyche are stripped away like pieces of filet mignon._

O'Neill shuddered in his sleep and rolled to his other side.

_Steel, propelled with the force of a hyper space jump, driving into vulnerable flesh: an arm, a shoulder, a lung - intense, flowering pain that drove reason beyond madness – steel straight through the heart … cessation of physical pain … an all encompassing bloom of white light …, and yet no termination of the endless ache … futile resistance … muscle and sinew pinioned …_

"Ket mettet!" The war cry woke every living thing within a radius of ten klicks. "O'Neill!" Teal'c was over the fire in a single bound, weapon clutched in one hand, a fistful of the front of Daniejackson’s tee shirt in the other as he hauled his teammate up.

Swearing volubly, Jack swam to consciousness for the second time that night, showering drops of sweat like rain as he shook his head to rid himself of the images. He did not realize he was sitting up until he turned his head at the soft gasp of horror on his right.

On the other side of Daniel, Carter surged up on an elbow, fully awake. “Oh my God!” she gasped, her face eloquently mirroring his emotions.

Terror, revulsion, dread were all reflected back at him in the brief instant they locked gazes before he could fortify his defenses.

“Don’t," the colonel snapped, chopping a hand through the air.

For a moment Sam couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t tear her gaze from the rigid form determinedly staring her down. Only Janet and the general had been included in the colonel's debrief after his escape from Ba'al's fortress.

"Are you awake, Danieljackson?" Teal'c broke the hyper aware silence as he carefully laid down his weapon and moved a large hand to delicately lower the archaeologist. "I regret I did not have the luxury of rousing you from your slumber leisurely."

The red-rimmed blue eyes flicked briefly to Jack, then up to Teal'c, and slammed shut.

Wordlessly, Jack abandoned the sleeping bag, grabbed his boots and disappeared into the purple shadows lacing the camp perimeter.

Sam, her heart still slamming painfully hard against the wall of her chest, wrapped her arms around her knees. “Did you know?” She slanted a hard look at the Jaffa.

Teal'c met her gaze squarely; then unexpectedly bowed his head. "Ba'al's penchant for acid and knives is well known.” There was a moment of silence as his gaze slanted to their linguist. He had not known of Danieljackson’s involvement, but it illuminated a subject he’d long been pondering.

Since an evening eleven months prior to this night, when while meditating, the answer to rescuing O’Neill from Ba’al’s fortress had slipped into his mind, borne on silent, though urgent, wings. He’d risen with alacrity to present the case to General Hammond.

“A fighting chance,” Teal’c murmured now.

A reflexive gag brought Daniel to his knees, frantically trying to free himself from the confines of his sleeping bag. Teal'c stripped it way and lifted him bodily to his feet where he swayed for a moment before staggering into the darkness on a path opposite O’Neill’s flight.

Sam shoved back her own sleeping bag, making a wordless sound of protest as she started to rise.

“Do not, Majorcarter It is not in Danieljackson’s best interests to pursue him at this time. He will find O’Neill.”

“The colonel might just shred him, Teal’c,” Sam said softly, though she subsided, instinctively knowing the Jaffa was right.

“I do not believe so.” Teal’c, having watched until Danieljackson disappeared among the tall cedars, turned to look down at Majorcarter. “Would you care to join me at the fire? I do not believe any of us will obtain much rest through what remains of the night either.”

Sam shoved her hands through her tousled hair. “Yeah. Break out the doughnuts; this could be a long watch.”

Beyond sight and sound of his teammates, Daniel dropped to his hands and knees and threw up until the back of his throat was raw and nothing but acid roiled in his stomach. The queasiness passed quickly once his stomach emptied, but the aura of Jack’s helplessness settled over his mind with the familiar weight of an old, familiar coat. He knew that despair as if it were his own.

Pushing up, he wobbled to a nearby tree, slumped against the lichen-covered bark and slid back to the ground. To invade - much less broadcast - Jack's agony was unthinkable. Even when they’d been furiously angry with each other, they’d guarded one another's privacy with the ferocity of pit bulls. It wasn’t a memory exactly, more like visceral acknowledgement emanating from the very marrow of his bones.

He would not have divulged that information under torture - if he'd known he possessed it. But the subconscious had a funny way of turning you inside out and upside down, shaking out all your secrets so they rolled down the red carpet to infamy.

Worse though, there was no way his subconscious could dish out that kind of dirt unless he’d been there. Daniel dropped his head in his hands, clinging tenaciously to the one fact he knew for certain – Jack was alive. He’d gotten out somehow. Obviously no thanks to his ascended friend; there’d been no grand rescue in the looping nightmare.

Abydos… Jack… what other unpardonable sins were buried in the rubble of his memories?

The inky purple sky was fading to a soft violet brushed with streaks of rose when he finally pulled himself together and staggered to his feet. Mechanically, he oriented toward the river, making a wide detour around camp. Being flesh and blood again meant mundane things like sweat and sickness clung to his skin and clothes. He wondered briefly if he’d be around long enough this time to appreciate it again.

Trudging through the grove on a parallel course with the river, he scrabbled through the memories piling up, searching for something … anything… that could possibly help him comprehend the thought of abandoning his best friend to the heinous acts perpetrated by that insanely sadistic alien.

Apparently energy beings had no more use for feelings than they did for a body. Decency seemed to be a little lacking on their agenda as well. He could not imagine anything that could have torn him from Jack’s side, nor a force powerful enough to have stopped him from ripping the place apart brick by brick in order to free his friend.  
  
Branches slapped his face, snatching at his clothes as fragrant needles pricked and stabbed at the soles of his bare feet. Uncaring, and undeterred, his mind chartered the territory he covered while his brain spun with endless questions.

_Who had been there for Jack? Who had held his sanity in the darkness? Who had been his safe harbor? His anchor? How the hell had he managed to survive an experience like that? Where did he find the strength to go on? …_

Moon spawned shadows reached long fingers into the ribbon of silver mist hovering between the stony verges of the river banks. Murky darkness was just beginning to lighten into pre-dawn gloom as Daniel slipped and slid wearily down the steeply sloping bank.

He waded in clothes and all. The stream where they’d crossed on the way to the temple from the Stargate, a few days ago, had been little more than a brook. They’d splashed through the ankle deep water without getting their feet wet. Shivering, he stopped when the water reached his calves and waited for his body to acclimatize. It was cold, but refreshing, and swept away the last of the dream residue. He waded in further, sank to his knees and ducked under the gurgling, chuckling stream.

A wisp of trailing fog lifted to reveal a pair of boots perched on top of a beached rock as he came up streaming water, his teeth chattering.

Indecision, hedged by caution, warred with need. Daniel needed to make this right, but Jack would be monumentally pissed by the inadvertent betrayal. More than that, it would take some time to shove the inevitable emotions the nightmare was bound to have stirred and shaken, back into the deep well where Jack relegated all things requiring more than glib responses.

Whether it was another of those marrow deep _knowings_ or he’d intuited it from their conversations over the last several weeks, Daniel was aware the colonel had only one religion, and he was extremely committed to it. It was spelled a-v-o-i-d-a-n-c-e.

Unconsciously, Daniel touched the ring of intricately knotted fishing line stretched over his left little finger. The only mention of Ba’al, by Jack, had been in the truck on the way to do clothes shopping. He’d said nothing two weeks ago during their discussion of trust on top of Cheyenne Mountain. How _had_ Jack managed to completely set aside the animosity he must surely have felt at the first betrayal?

Wringing water from his shirt, Daniel turned to peer into the silver shot fog. The water swirled playfully around his calves again as he waded out to a flat-topped rock in the middle of the stream.

The colonel eyed him stonily for a long moment before finally deigning to reach down and give him a hand up. Bare feet scrambling for purchase on the slick stone, Daniel scaled the slippery incline and sat down, dripping, well away from the older man.

“Where’s your weapon?” Jack snarled.

“Where’s yours?” Daniel retorted, pulling his knees up to his chin and wrapping his arms around his ankles in an effort to conserve warmth.

“My hands are a weapon!” Open palms slapped air angrily. “Or is that something else you’ve forgotten?”

Daniel shivered, though not from fear, and wisely kept his mouth shut. Jack’s anger had nothing to do with weapons.

“Oh for cryin’ out loud, get over here. You’re gonna shred the inside of your mouth the way your teeth are chattering.”

“I’m…”

“So help me, Daniel!” Jack grabbed an arm and yanked. “If the word _fine_ comes out of your mouth I’m shoving you back in the river.”

Because he had his elbows tucked tightly into his body and his wet ass slid accommodatingly, Daniel slithered sideways with little effort. When Jack let him go, they were shoulder to shoulder.

“Jack--”

“Shut up. I’m not in the mood.”

“Right.”

Photoshop images of similar shoulder to shoulder postures flashed rapidly across Daniel’s internal vision. A prison on Chulak; diving through a Stargate as debris rained down around them; another prison on a planet terra-formed to fit the myth of hell; a Gate dais in an abandoned Goa’uld pleasure palace; a city moldering with the incestuous decay of politicians drunk on the power of a technology they were incapable of conceiving, much less taming.

Daniel shivered again.

Jack found his fingers stretching involuntarily. Waking up inside that nightmare had been worse than living it, because for several heartbeats, he’d thought he was still in it and had only dreamt of having escaped.

He growled; an articulation deep in his throat that didn’t begin to express his frustration. For a moment – though only for a moment – he wished they’d never gone to Vis Uban. Never met Arrom. Never known their missing teammate had committed the unpardonable sin, whatever that was for an ascended being, and gotten himself kicked out.

Unless of course breaking him out had been the unpardonable sin. That brought Jack up short. He’d always known Daniel had had something to do with Yu’s unexpected arrival.

“What do you remember about Abydos?”

“Abydos?” Daniel parroted. He stared blankly at Jack for several moments. “Most of it, I think.”

Unfortunately, unlike a systematic computer download, the rushing memories he’d been assaulted by on Anubis ship had not come in any particular order. The borders of the puzzle were in place, but he was still trying to put the pieces together to form the picture of his life.

“Kasuf…Ska’ara…your militia.” Daniel smiled involuntarily. “They idolized you, you know.”

Jack flirted a shoulder. “No, I meant, do you remember anything about the last time we were there?”

“Together? When Shifu was born?”

“You remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Oh…No, I meant when you helped us find the tablet.”

“Tablet?”

“Yeah, you know; Elvis impression in the SGC elevator? Crossing the line? Finding the tablet with the address of the Lost City?”

“The tablet we used to lure Anubis to Vis Uban. Yeah, I know the tablet.”

“No, I asked do you remember anything about finding the tablet on Abydos?”

“No you didn’t.”

“Daniel,” Jack warned, pausing to wrap his anger a little more tightly around himself in order to keep it under control. “Let’s not…spar, okay? Your jab could unleash my upper cut and I really don’t want to hurt you.” Which wasn’t strictly true.

It was a strange kind of anger coiling like a Goa’uld around his brainstem. A resurrection of sorts: of defiance fading to despair as hours became days, days became weeks and the hope of escape ebbed out of existence, of the foul causticity of fear feasting on failing courage, of brokenness masked by a lifetime of instinct honed on the knife edge of insolence.

He’d kept back only the girl’s identity and then only because Daniel had stopped the wheel of madness whirling him into oblivion time after time. But he’d given up his soul piece by agonizing piece in order to shield her.

The familiar taste of gun metal and desolation had been crawling up the back of his throat as he’d lain in the infirmary staring at the grey concrete vault of a ceiling.

And then Daniel had appeared again.

“We’ve been over and over this; I don’t remember anything from the time I was gone,” Daniel asserted, though chattering teeth mocked the intensity of his voice.

“Well now,” Jack drawled acidly, “that’s not quite true is it.” There was no questioning inflection at the end of the statement. If it had been true, his secrets would still be safely buried. Where they belonged.

Conflicted didn’t begin to address his feelings at the moment. He wanted to wrap the weapons at the ends of his arms around the vulnerable neck of the kid sitting next to him and squeeze the life out of him for exposing the squalor of his soul.

And yet, if the kid sitting next to him hadn’t rescued him, he might still be living in that hell.

More than that, Daniel’s benediction, or blessing, whatever he’d done in the infirmary, had stripped away all that raw anger. Jack had willingly entered into Daniel’s offered suspension of disbelief and found, to his astonishment, his soul - not just pieced back together - but whole in a way he couldn’t remember feeling since the middle years of his marriage. When he and Sarah had been wildly in love, their passion for life and each other igniting the spark that had been their son and the unfathomable joy Charlie had brought into their home.

“Damn you,” Jack cursed violently. It felt like he was vibrating still from the kickback of the emotional vulnerability It was a good thing he had nothing left to hide, given Daniel’s penchant for exposing things best left buried.

Teal’c he could have vented to without worrying and been assured the big guy would screw his head back on straight when he was done. The miserable, soaked Daniel sitting next to him would not be able to separate the intellectual need to vent from the misery of the exorcism.

He had a burning desire to pummel something, anything, to rid himself of the negative energy coursing through his veins like snakebite venom.

Purloining one of the linguist’s sighs, Jack ratcheted down the cover on his well of sorrows. He refused to use Daniel, even for a verbal punching bag. It wasn’t his fault. He had no more control over his nightmares than Jack had over his own riotously clashing emotions.

Maybe Teal’c would go a few rounds in the garden with him later, while Carter babysat Daniel translating temple walls.

“Why did you come out here?”

_Probably because I’m a closet masochist and just haven’t figured it out yet,_ Daniel thought. “I don’t know. Maybe because I thought…”

“What?” Jack demanded when Daniel didn’t go on. “Explain what the hell happened?” He’d never had the nerve to question Teal’c or Carter too closely, for fear of raising questions he hadn’t wanted to answer. But there were still a helluva lot more questions than answers. And they were buzzing around in his head again, like angry hornets.

They said he’d been missing a month. He had no idea how long he’d been in the fortress before Daniel had appeared. Jack had been certain he’d been hallucinating. No way out, and his mind had conjured Daniel as comfort. Though he’d decided almost immediately _I leave and look at the mess you get yourself into_ probably wouldn’t have been his first choice of words to put into a hallucination’s mouth.

“And? So? Therefore?” He snarled, hating his tone, not to mention himself at the moment. It didn’t appear his brain was planning to cooperate with his mouth on that not using Daniel as a verbal punching bag thing.

“I knew this would be a bad time.” Daniel edged forward on the rock. “Maybe we should try this again later.”

At least his self-preservation instincts were kicking in. Jack was momentarily proud.

“Nah, let’s not.”

Daniel, one foot already in the water, hesitated.

“Now-or-later,” Jack articulated very clearly. “What’s done is done and you fixed it in the end. Leave it alone.”

“Uh, Jack?” Daniel’s attention appeared to be fixed on the water.

Jack rolled his eyes.

“We need to get out of here. Right now.” Daniel slid off the rock, splashing into water up to his thighs.

Fingers of daylight were pushing back the predawn darkness, spilling opalescent light down the wide ribbon of water. Water that hadn’t even come up to Daniel’s knees as Jack had watched him wade out. And it was rising quickly. Without a word, he slid off the rock as well.

The campy little stream Daniel had ducked under a few minutes ago had become a torrent of surging eddies with an undertow that gave a masterful impression of trying to sweep them off their feet. The smooth, worn rocks lining the river bed were slippery as well, making progress even more difficult.

A handful of tee shirt clenched in Jack’s fist was the only thing between Daniel and another dunking for several moments, until he regained his footing and surged with the torrent rather than against it, coming out a little further downstream then he’d gone in.

Between Teal’c, and now Jack, hauling him up by it, Daniel’s tee shirt was beginng to look like a Salvation Army reject.

“Up that rock.” Jack pointed and made a grab for his boots at the same time, ripping a slip knot in the laces and slinging them around his neck. He was ten feet off the ground before he realized Daniel hadn’t followed. “Up, Daniel!” He could hear the roar of the water now. Any moment it was going to come racing around the sharp bend a few hundred yards above their river perch and overwhelm the little falls just behind it.

Fingernails wedged in cracks no bigger than pencil lead, bare toes precariously balanced on outcroppings not much wider and about the consistency of sugar wafers, Jack craned his neck around. “Oh for cryin’ out loud.” He didn’t have time to climb down _and_ up again. He shoved off the rock face with both hands, twisted in the air and landed running. “Are you trying to get yourself killed again?”

“Are you crazy? There’s no way I’m going up a ninety-degree wall.”

“It’s barely twice your height,” Jack said calmly, though he yanked his companion toward the rock face with urgency. “You can and you will.” He saw the instant the sound of the water finally registered.

They went up the twenty foot vertical wall like spider monkeys, Daniel as nimbly as his mentor. Jack swung up onto the ledge and turned to drag Daniel up over the last jaggedy edge. They both sprawled on the sandy shelf as they caught their breath.

“Amazing how certain death can motivate a person.” Jack dug a boot out from under his shoulder, pushing it above his head.

“Yeah,” Daniel wheezed. “Now I just have to get back down.” The little experience he’d had free climbing had taught him going down was much more difficult than going up.

Jack turned his head and was nearly blinded by the intensity of the sun as it topped the tree line. He threw up a hand, dimming the brilliance only slightly. “And me with no sun glasses,” he muttered disgustedly.

The wall of water hit the turn, obliterating all other sounds as it sloshed over the sides of the river banks and shot down the alleyway, driving the sun-shot apricot and gold mist before it like wild horses, unfurling a fashion runway for the rising sun.

“Our rock’s underwater,” Jack observed.

Daniel rolled over too, but kept well back from the edge and his eyes squeezed nearly shut. “Wow,” he exclaimed, thinking _under_ water might be a slight understatement.

Their rock was the center of a boiling froth of witches brew. As they watched, fountains of spray shot up around it, arcing glittering rainbows from the four corners of the flat surface. Geysers erupted on all sides, dancing sinuously to the music of the rushing river as the water continued to rise in a roiling mass of molten gold.

“It’s an altar.” Daniel sat up and slid back on his ass until his shoulders met the face of the rock wall.

“Altar?” Jack shifted to his side, rolling fluidly to his feet. “You’re kidding. In the middle of a river?” He lingered at the edge, watching the show.

“Probably to the sun. Gifts would have been placed on it as offerings to persuade it to rise every day. See how the rays look like they’re slanting straight down the alley the river makes?”

As the sun rose, the runway of water was being topped up with golden sunlight, the first narrow band broadening to stripe roots, then tree trunks, branches and leaves and finally treetops with morning light.

“The Ancients worshiped something? Other than themselves?” Jack glanced briefly over his shoulder, eyebrows raised.

“They don’t consider themselves gods; merely higher beings. Aside from that, they may not have been the only, or even the last, people to inhabit this planet. I suspect Oma and Shifu were only sheltering here.”

“Sanctuary,” Jack murmured, fascinated by the beauty of the scene unfolding below them.

“Exactly.”

The river continued to rise, swelling inside the second set of banks clearly visible from this higher vantage point, churning up white caps that, kissed by the new light, became filigreed gold.

Jack sat down, draping his legs over the side of the rock. When they’d started up the rock face, the water hadn’t even been lapping at the bottom of it. Now, an occasional hiccupping whitecap tickled his bare soles. “Man made or naturally occurring?”

“The fountains are certainly created. No clue about the river. We’d have to find the source.”

Tacit agreement kept them both silent as they watched dawn paint the new morning with bold strokes of glowing color.

In the space of twenty minutes, as the sun rose higher in the bright, cloudless sky, the tributary crested, ceased to foam and churn, and morphed from raging tiger to romping kitten, subsiding almost as quickly as it had risen, within its original shallow banks.

As if by alchemy, molten gold transmuted into glints of silver dancing like faeries across the surface of the sparkling stream.

A solitary bird trilled, welcoming the day. Another, and then another, joined in, swelling the morning choir as they sang praises to the new dawn. No cathedral service Jack had ever attended – admittedly few – could match the sanctity of the end of morning Matins heralded here by the birds and the river and the sun. Maybe the Ancients had been on to something after all.

Jack picked up his feet and swiveled around on his ass. “You can open your eyes. Show’s over; I’m not hanging over the side anymore.”

“Thank you.” Though Daniel did not open his eyes.

Jack clasped his hands loosely around his slightly bent knees. “So…if we have to do this, I may as well get it over with and be done with it for good.”

Daniel slit his eyes open. Perhaps beauty had tamed the savage beast? At least Jack no longer looked as though he’d just as soon hurl him off the cliff face as look at him.

“Did I misunderstand the words _‘shut up, I’m not in the mood’_?”

“Bite me.” Jack bared his teeth. “It’s a curse I bear with dignity, having to surround myself with people with minds like steel traps.”

“Especially since you’re not in the habit of sharing how sharp you are.”

“Like you don’t use that ploy all the time.”

“Excuse me?”

Jack had the audacity to laugh. “Oh come on. You know damn well there are distinct tactical advantages to playing dumb. You do it too, just in a different way.”

Daniel looked aghast.

“Hello? Every time you go through the Gate with that _‘It’s just me, Daniel Jackson, peaceful explorer, I’m harmless,’_ façade you’ve perfected.”

“That’s not a façade.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “You can snap a man’s neck with your hands, Daniel, or shoot him dead on the run. You’re not nearly as harmless, anymore, as you like people to think.”

Daniel opened his mouth. And shut it again.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining; just pointing out you shouldn’t be calling the kettle black when you practice the same art form so skillfully.”

“Yeah, and half an hour ago you were yelling at me for leaving camp without a weapon.”

“Touché; I withdraw the accusation.”

A long silence stretched between them, filled with the sound of the rippling stream and the surrounding woods coming to life as the sunrise cast its glory over the entire valley, waking the local neighborhood.

Long before Daniel had arrived on the scene, Ba’al had filleted his soul, methodically stripping away the rage of multiple layers of betrayal and treachery, along with any hope his team or the SGC might find him. Despair had been embedded as deeply in his psyche as one of the bastard’s acid-tipped knives.

Neither had he been particularly pleased to find himself on the receiving end of Daniel’s plan, particularly since it involved stepping into the void with no clue what might be in store. He’d just wanted to end it the quickest way possible.

He’d managed to work up the energy to be pissed when Daniel had refused, but even that had drained away quickly, leaving only the flat despair of knowing he could protect neither himself, nor the woman, for much longer.

He’d gone back into the chamber from hell knowing that the end was near, that having uncovered the secret Ba’al was looking for, it wouldn’t take much longer for the Goa’uld to uncover it as well.

And then, coming out of the sarc for the last time, waiting in the cell...

He’d waited in a few cells in his life; waited a few times for death too. But never with the kind of cellular level hopelessness with which he’d waited for his last interview with Ba’al. He would betray to an agonizing death, a woman his brain _chemistry_ told him was important, though his rational intellect said just the opposite. Anyway you sliced it, he would betray to her death, a woman, and that did not sit well with Jack O’Neill. He’d prayed that the acid would burn a hole in his tongue before he could blurt out the unholy alliance. Prayed that Ba’al’s hand would slip and a knife would slice through his vocal chords.

Alone, stripped of even the last vestiges of self-esteem, he’d waited for the end.

And then Daniel had been there again. The gravity challenged cell had suddenly been standing on its head, with Daniel’s voice ringing in his ears, _This is it. All you ever wanted was a fighting chance, Jack, now you have it. If anyone can make it out of here, you can._

Curiously, the escape had rekindled all that raw, unquenchable anger, but it had also fueled the adrenalin that got his feet under him and his body moving forward in a way he would have been unable to accomplish lost in the morass of depression he’d sunk into.

“Kind of ironic, huh? You, me, sitting here in the sun, alive and well.” Jack flexed his fingers. “Flesh and blood. You know me; I’m not that good with the unknown. I wasn’t about to flip a coin and hop a train to nowhere, just because it was the only one outta there.”

Daniel frowned. Fatigue was dulling his brain. There was some clue in there he was supposed to latch on to, but he wasn’t getting it.

Jack cleared his throat. “I suppose you want it from the beginning.”

Daniel just looked at him – one of those looks that a year ago would have sent him into orbit. Today it tightened his gut and slathered on another layer of guilt. It had taken awhile but he’d finally worked out that part of their problem in the two years before Daniel’s extended vacation in the ether had involved their entwined destinies.

Jack had never believed in fate. Providence happened because he made it happen. He prodded and poked and pushed until he had the outcome he wanted. Chance had never been an acknowledged word in his vocabulary. He didn’t take chances; he prepared, he organized and he planned. If plan A didn’t work, he always had a plan B and C, as backup, as far down the alphabet as necessary in order to keep the members of his various teams alive and well. As for destiny, Jack made his own.

Destiny, however, had taken a good look at Jack’s insubordination and kicked him in the ass. Showing up in the form of a lanky, six-foot archaeologist who refused to fit into any box Jack understood. And destiny had entwined their paths so tightly he’d been unable to insert even a knife blade between them to sever the link.

Destiny he didn’t believe in and Jack O’Neill had been constantly at odds.

But that was before.

“Fine. From the beginning. I suppose it really started in Antarctica. I vaguely remember the flight home and being in the infirmary. They tell me I agreed to be snaked, which supports my theory that I was out of my mind. Anyway, next thing I know, I’m waking up in this fortress, minus the snake that’s apparently just resurrected me. And it doesn’t take too long to figure out my sole purpose here is to be murdered repeatedly by my sleaze ball snake’s overdressed, distant cousin on his mother’s side.”

Jack shifted uncomfortably, dropping his hands to his sides. He swirled a pile of sand into a miniature mountain, then stabbed his finger into the middle of it. “Then one of the times I’m standing on my head when I should have been lying on my ass, I look up and find a familiar face staring down at me.” He glanced up at Daniel who immediately looked away, though his expressive features were locked in a distorted grimace.

Unable to sit still, Jack rose and began to pace the ledge. It was maybe eight feet long and two-thirds that wide. It did little to ease the anxiety beginning to build again.

“I lost track of hours and days, got no clue how long I’d been in there before you showed up. But to make a long story short, I’m thinking you’re some kind of delusion I’ve dreamed up and when I throw my shoe through you, it really kind of reinforces the idea, but you insist you’re really there – if unable to do anything other than console an old friend.”

Daniel remained silent, but for a change, tried sending through the etheric thread rather than receiving, hoping Jack was too caught up to notice.

“But, you tell me, you’re not gonna let Ba’al torture me into craziness – which I thought was an excellent idea. Unfortunately, your plan to accomplish that didn’t fit in with any of my plans.”

The clue. Daniel banged his head gently on his knees. “I didn’t.”

“You did,” Jack contradicted. “You wanted me to open my mind, let go of my burdens. Now, I ask you, Daniel, what burdens do I have to let go of? I’m a big fan of Eckhart Tolle and living in the moment. I try not to drag around my past or worry about the future. And I’m pretty damn good at it.” He stopped abruptly. “But I can’t erase my past.” He trudged the few steps over to Daniel and turned to slide down the wall beside him. “There was no way I could do what you were asking. No way.”

“That’s not true,” Daniel said quietly. “But it wasn’t fair to try to bend you to my will, just because I wanted company.”

Jack dragged up his knees and propped his arms straight out. “You’re kidding, right?”

Daniel spread his hands in resignation.

Jack dropped his head back against the rock. “You didn’t offer me a chance to come along and kick some universal ass, ya know; instead you told me it was the only way to save my soul.”

“Obviously that wasn’t true either.”

As if Daniel hadn’t spoken, Jack continued, “I was touched you thought it was worth saving, but you, of all people, know how black my soul is. No amount of scrubbing is gonna clean it up.”

“I hope someday you figure out you’re a far better man than you believe.”

“Maybe if you stick around this time, you can drill it into my head.”

Naturally, just when he needed dumb Jack, the brilliant one showed up. If he knew about the plan, the man had to reading his mind. Daniel scrambled for a diversion.

“What?” Jack so knew _that_ look. “Just spit it out, you’re going to set something on fire the way the gears are churning in there.”

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Oh – let’s start with — function?”

“I don’t have any problem with function, just finding women.”

For a split second the silence was all encompassing.

“Oh come on, laugh!” Jack elbowed his companion. “I’m just trying to lighten things up a little.”

“Yeah, okay,” Daniel’s chuckle sounded like someone trying to swing on a rusty garden gate.

“I do it the same way you do. Or Teal’c, or Carter, or Cassie. The same way everybody deals with trauma. You keep putting one foot in front of the other until the burden gets a little lighter, a little easier to carry. Once in awhile you look around and realize your sack might have darker secrets, but they’re probably not any heavier than the guy three offices down who lost his parents when he was a kid. Then a wife he’d barely gotten to know, a kid of his own he never had a chance to have, not to mention his life - several times over.”

Jack raised his eyes to the far side of the river, sighting on a tall deciduous tree whose bare roots hung over the edge of the high bank.

“You do it because the altarnative is to blow your brains out. I’ve been on both sides of that dilemma. Trust me; it’s no prettier on the other side.” Then he did turn his head. “What’s so different about what happened to me in Ba’al’s fortress and what happened to you on Kelowna?”

“For starters, Kelowna didn’t happen over and over again.” Daniel shuddered.

“Memory or just the dream?” Jack inquired softly.

Daniel was silent for a long moment, gaze turned inward, reaching deep for what he actually remembered. “I don’t know…probably just the dream.”

The anguish in the gaze he lifted to Jack was nothing compared to the distress physically pumping through that thread thing. Carter and Teal’c must have absorbed some of it, Jack thought, or he might have been blasted off the rock.

“I did nothing.”

“That _is_ just the dream and also untrue.”

Daniel, hands clenched around his drawn up knees, head back against the rock wall, eyes squeezed shut, shuddered again, physically, but deep down in his soul too. The kickback rocked them all.

“Then why were you back in that sarcophagus again?”

“Ah, we’re not quite done with the CliffNotes yet. We still have the happy ending to review.”

“Right.” There it was again. At least there had been a happy ending, even if he’d had nothing to do with it. Daniel squeezed his eyes shut tighter.

And Sam thought he was the kind of person he’d like to get know, though maybe she’d changed her mind by now.

Abydos…Jack…probably fortunate the military no longer shot deserters.

“I asked if you remembered anything about Abydos because I’ve wondered if that was the beginning of the end for your…etheric tour.” A year ago the word etheric hadn’t been in his vocabulary either. “Or if you did something when you pulled me out of that abyss that pissed off your glowy friends.”

Daniel’s head turned slowly. “How?”

Jack shrugged and reached a foot to draw his pile of sand into range. “All I know is I was waiting for my final curtain call with Ba’al and suddenly there you were again, telling me the fighting chance I needed was about to happen.”

He scooped up the sand and began to pour it from hand to hand between his knees. When it ran out, he scooped it up again and started over.

“Something happened to the gravity generator. My cell righted itself by an unseen hand and somehow the girl was right where I needed her to be. Ba’al’s Jaffa were shouting about an attack by Yu, but we didn’t hang around to get more details. We hightailed it to the Stargate and this time made it through.”

“Honestly,” Jack squinted at the linguist, “I wasn’t absolutely convinced you weren’t an illusion until you showed up that last time in the infirmary and handed over my sanity, all gift-wrapped and looking shiny and bright again.”

“Yet another _random_ act kindness,” Daniel mugged. “That was incredibly generous of me considering I was the reason you were in danger of losing it in the first place, don’t ya think?”

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud. You’re feeling guilty for something you can’t even remember! If you hadn’t done what you did, we wouldn’t be sitting here sunbathing right now. Do you see the irony?”

“No.”

“I suppose if you’re as tired as I am, it’s no wonder that agile mind isn’t following.” Jack watched one of the feathered, early morning chorale members sail across the channel. “If you hadn’t shown up when you did, if you hadn’t gracefully accepted my flat out refusal to join you on that higher plane of existence, if you hadn’t turned that preposterously agile mind of yours to other avenues of liberation, perhaps neither of us would be flesh and blood right now. Ba’al said himself I was losing my mind; I wouldn’t have been any kind of sport much longer.”

Jack wiggled his fingers again, this time in Daniel’s face. “The irony, Daniel, is that we’re both flesh and blood, both alive, occupying time and space in this dimension. It was a typical Jack and Daniel outing. I wanted it done my way; you wanted it done your way. You found a compromise that worked for both of us. If that’s not ironic, especially given the peculiar circumstances we were in, I don’t know what is.”

“But…how do you know it was me?”

“Well, I left out a lot of the details, but trust me - this had your fingerprints all over it. In the process you saved not only my ass, but my sanity, and probably my soul as well. So – thanks. Now can we change the subject? Tell me about this current plan you have to save the universe.”

“Plan?”

The genuine look of confusion at the conversational shift lasted exactly seven seconds – Jack timed it – before morphing into surprise, followed by resistance.

“I don’t suppose it would work to tell you the subject isn’t open for discussion?”

“Good guess.”

“Well, in any case, I hate to disappoint you, but I really don’t have a plan.”

“That’s bullshit. You might not have a plan you want to share, but you always have a plan.”

“This isn’t exactly a hard science. I’m not figuring out equations and formulas and there are no fill-in-the blank answers for this kind of thing.”

“And? Therefore? So?”

Daniel scooted forward so he could lean back on his hands and dropped his head back with a sigh. “Therefore I don’t have a plan, Jack.”

“What about that monk guy?”

“What about him?”

“Didn’t he teach you all kinds of stuff you could do with your mind?”

“Hazy on that one. I remember being here, I remember meeting Oma and holding Shifu.” He might be able to make that one fly.

“Monk guy, you said was like a curator here,” Jack prodded. “He showed you how to light a candle and move things around with your mind?”

Daniel made dismissive noise. “Child’s play for an Ancient. What’s your point?”

“Is that what the stuff on the walls is about?”

“Lighting candles and moving things around with your mind? No. Well, sort of…though not really.”

It was more about moving time around with your mind, or more precisely moving around _in time_ within your mind; Jack was unlikely to appreciate the nuanced particulars of either distinction.

“Give me a sneak preview. You know, short, concise, understandable in Earth English.”

Daniel contemplated for a moment. “We’re here because General Hammond asked me to do some research on the subject of whether or not Anubis could come back to haunt us, right?”

“I don’t need a briefing on what I know; I need to know what I don’t know. How far along are you?”

“How far along?”

“Long night, I know,” Jack offered sympathetically, “but you’re sounding a lot like a parrot. Something new and fresh would be good. How far along the road to figuring out how to ascend on your own? You know, solo? Unaccompanied? All by your lonesome?”

Shit. Shit. Shit. What had he done to give it away?

“Well, it would be a lot easier if I had a road map.” Daniel rolled his neck. “I might actually be making progress.”

“Not what I asked. Let’s try this again. How much progress have you made? And if you tell me not as much as you’d like, I may not be able to resist the temptation to throw you back into the river from this vantage point.”

Like a bloodhound on the scent of prey. Damn the man’s uncanny perception.

Daniel quit trying to throw him off track. It was useless anyway. “Enough to believe it’s possible.”

“Probable even?”

Daniel sighed. “Yes.”

“So once you’ve figured it out, how’re you gonna get back this time?”

This was where it began to get sticky. “I’m working on that part.”

“And you’re not going to do this until you’ve figured out that part, right?” Jack leveled the full force of his gaze at the archaeologist. “Right?”

“I’ll try.”

“That’s not good enough, Daniel. I want your word you won’t attempt this unless you know you can come back.”

“That might not be possible,” Daniel hedged.

“You’re suggesting you can’t keep your word?”

“No, I’m telling you I’m not going to give it to you.”

Jack eyed the younger man for a long moment. “I’m gonna let you tell that to Carter and Teal’c.” He rose and offered a hand up.

“I can’t.”

“You have two lips, a tongue, and the necessary vocal chords.”

“I can’t promise.” Ignoring the outstretched hand, Daniel scrambled up under his own power.

“Ditto the previous statement. You’re not incapable. You’re making a choice. Come on, we need to get back to camp.” The colonel swung down over the side of the ledge and disappeared.

“That’s not it at all!” Daniel had a moment’s hesitation as he sat down on the edge and peered over. The twenty foot drop was only slightly less heady than hanging off the railing on his old balcony.

“I’m not asking you _not_ to try it, Daniel.” Jack oomphed as he lost his grip and grabbed a protruding rock. “I know I can’t stop you. I’m only asking that you not attempt it until you know you can make it a round trip.” He glanced up. “Come on, you have to actually get over the edge before you can start down.”

“It might not be possible,” Daniel repeated. He closed his eyes and rolled over, sliding down until all his weight was suspended by his arms.

Cold fingers slid around his ankle, guiding bare toes to a minimal crack that would support him long enough to find the next one.

_Oh yeah, hardwired for sure_ , Jack thought. Daniel would jump off the face of the cliff before admitting his fear of heights had paralyzed him, even if it was only momentarily. It was the most natural thing in the world to reach up and steer a dangling foot to a safe harbor. Otherwise they might be here the rest of the day.

Jack waited until he was sure confidence was restored and traversed the remainder of the wall. “Then don’t do it.”

“What?” Daniel grunted, having lost track of the conversation in his concentration.

“Try this ascension business until you know you can make it a round trip,” Jack reminded, pushing off to jump the last few feet.

Daniel glanced over his shoulder at the thud. “Unless I try, I won’t know if I can do it either way.”

“As you just reminded me, we’re here to figure out whether or not it’s possible for a Goa’uld to do the glowy thing. So what’s it gonna it take?”

Daniel didn’t even pretend to misunderstand. He stretched to the full length of his reach, toes searching for their next grip before running his hands one at a time over the wall looking for hand holds in order to creep another foot or so down the face of the cliff.

As Jack had pointed out, he was nearly half the height of the damn thing, it shouldn’t be so harrowing. But neither was it as effortless as Jack made it look.

“An extended, uninterrupted period of contemplative meditation.”

“To the right,” the colonel instructed, filing away that little tidbit, certain Daniel was more worried about climbing down than divulging useful information. “No, your foot. Move your foot six inches to the right. There. Now a little to the right with your left hand and down about eighteen inches.”

With coaching Daniel was at the bottom in less than five minutes, flexing his numb fingers and toes. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“Tibet. We should get back before Carter and Teal’c send out search parties.”

“Right. Especially since splitting themselves into search parties might overtax their resources. What was in Tibet?”

“If I told ya, I’d have to shoot you. You okay?”

“Tibet,” Daniel repeated, waving off Jack’s concern as he slumped forward, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. “That had to be some serious free climbing.”

“Yeah, you learn fast or die.” He had a couple of toes that still ached most of the Colorado winter. Strangely, defectors rarely requested pick-up from the Riviera. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I’m…” Daniel reconsidered before the word fine slipped out of his mouth and he ended up back in the river. “Adrenalin’s a little high at the moment.” Experimentally, he took a deep breath, than another. Nope, head still pounding like an Amish barn raising.

“From a twenty foot wall? We have so got to get you back in shape again.” Jack squatted beside him, ignoring his twinging knees. “Here’s an idea. Let’s grab some breakfast and a nap, in that order, and see if Carter and Teal’c want to play hooky today. We’ve got several more days here. We could take a hike up the river, go looking for your source.”

Daniel deliberated for the length of time it took to straighten up. He was very curious about the river and maybe the ideas he was trying to wrap his head around would naturally pollinate and blossom if he stopped trying to force comprehension.

“Okay.” Besides, even if he was able to nap, it wouldn’t generate nearly the amount of energy it was going to take to maintain the length and duration of concentration he needed to bring to bear on the plan.

“Okay?” Jack echoed in surprise. “We have time for a field trip?” He rose as well, eyeing the tree line above their heads. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Since I freely handed you the keys to stopping me if you’re determined, what could I possibly be holding back?”

“Right. Okay.” Considerably more cognizant that Jack had given him credit for. “I still think there’s more.”

Daniel rolled his eyes as he pulled his clammy shirt away from his chest. “All right. I might have a chance to stop Anubis before he can make it the rest of the way.”

Jack whirled around instantly, smacking that clammy tee shirt right back against cold wet skin as he slapped a hand on Daniel’s chest. “No frickin’ way! Only an idiot keeps doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. That,” he emphasized each word with a poke to the broad chest he’d just slapped, “is a bad plan, Daniel.”

“You don’t know that for sure. That might have been the line I crossed. Maybe that’s why the others stopped me. But if I figure this out on my own, they won’t be able to stop me again.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know for certain.” Daniel pointedly removed the poking finger. “But it seems logical to me. Obviously ascending doesn’t happen by invitation only. So if I make it there by my own initiative, how can they make me follow their rules?” He started for a nearby cut in the bank where they could climb out of the river bed. “Do you suppose that oily-skinned, over-the-top, clichéd bad guy plays by their rules?”

Jack threw up his hands.

Again – with the destiny. He was beginning to recognize the subtle signs that had always before provoked harsh, angry arguments.

Plus he’d finally figured out his own; it was to watch over Daniel. Daniel’s, it appeared, was to save the world.

There was not a thing he could do about it except rant and rave and that had always gotten him into trouble. He opted for silence as he scrambled up what looked like an animal path, to the higher bank.

A change of clothes and breakfast did nothing to lighten the somber mood they’d both fallen into. Nor did either of them enlighten Carter and Teal’c, who had waited to eat breakfast with them.

Jack supposed sooner or later he would have to share some version of Ba’al’s Bed and Breakfast with the others. He had yet to live down the Asgard/Tollan debacle.

They were all tired, edgy, and short-tempered. In fact, he ordered everyone back to bed as soon as breakfast dishes were rinsed and put away. And back to their tents, just in case Daniel might actually sleep longer than the rest of them.

Teal’c had gone quietly, as ordered, though as soon as his exhausted companions had drifted off, he’d returned to watch. It was not needed, but he was content to do so.

O’Neill was, not surprisingly, first to rise, followed shortly thereafter by Majorcarter.

Sam glanced questioningly at the colonel as she joined them, accepting the cup of coffee Teal’c handed her. “He okay?” she asked quietly.

“I don’t know, Carter. But I’d prefer to let him sleep as long as possible.”

“Of course, sir. And he does seem to be sleeping soundly.” She looked up from her coffee with a half smile. “Maybe that’s the cure. Switch our schedule around so we work nights and sleep during the day.”

“You might be on to something, Carter,” Jack lowered his own coffee and cleared his throat. “I should have told you both.”

“A warrior speaks of these things only when there is a need, O’Neill. There was no need.”

“But…now there is. At least some of it.” Jack returned his gaze to the dark liquid, glad for its warmth between his hands. “You may wonder now, at my quick recovery, given that I was probably in that sarcophagus far longer than Daniel ever was on Shyla’s planet.” He paused, took a deep breath and shared perhaps his most clarifying moment. “Daniel had no one to heal him like he did for me. No one to reestablish the body’s natural order after that obscene contraption blasts it to kingdom come. No one to restore the intricate cellular level responses needed in order to mend.”

Carter and Teal’c sat still as standing stones, absorbing the revelation with more than just ears. They were absorbing the deep, intrinsic restoration of one Jack O’Neill through that etheric thread Daniel’s return had gifted them with.

“I never asked, because frankly, I never intended to share any of this. But I know his intervention in some way freed me from that nightmare.”

“I suspect that Danieljackson may have influenced the Tok’ra High Counsel to release their documentation. I believe he insinuated the thought in my mind, during meditation, that Lord Yu might be tempted by the information we subsequently uncovered.”

“It’s also probable Daniel planted the recognition in our minds that Kanan might have been predisposed to act by your code of conduct, sir.”

Jack sighed deeply. “He appeared out of nowhere, stayed with me until they came for me again, and then reappeared shortly after I woke up back in the cell. We argued. Naturally. He wanted me to choose his path. I wanted him to kill me before Ba’al did, and most especially before I gave up Ba’al’s personal lotar, the woman Kanan had returned for. I gather they were in love. But I digress…” He paused again to wipe away the cold sweat beading on his brow. “It was probably Daniel that shored up the courage to hold out that one last time with Ba’al. I couldn’t have done it. I’d been sliced and diced and thrown into that sarcophagus too many times to be able to resist on my own. And then Daniel was standing over me again, telling me that this was it, my fighting chance. I didn’t wait to say goodbye. Beat one of the guards to a bloody pulp, grabbed the girl and got the hell outta Dodge.” He swirled the coffee in his mug and took a long swallow. “The rest, as they say in the movies, is history. You pretty much know what happened after that.”

Jack looked up then, narrowing his eyes at Carter. “Stop that.”

“Sorry,” she murmured, biting her salty lip.

After a moment, Jack stretched out his legs, his gaze automatically shifting to the tent where Daniel slept on, undisturbed by his further confessions.

“I can’t decide if he’s a curse or a blessing, but I do know it was like living in hell without him.”

“It has been my experience, O’Neill, that blessings are often disguised as curses.”

Sam smiled through her tears. “You’d certainly know about that, Teal’c.”

They sat in companionable silence for awhile, feeling the need to be together, though without the constraints of conversation.

“So,” Jack broke the silence, though he continued to keep his voice low. “Did you hear the flash flood this morning?”

“I did not,” Teal’c rumbled.

“Flash flood?” Carter shook off her reverie, swiping at her wet cheeks with the palms of her hands. “Where? Surely not that little brook we crossed over on the way in from the Stargate.”

“The very one. Daniel seems to think it happens every morning. Some kind of offering to the sun. We’ll have to go back and see if it happens again tomorrow morning. It was really spectacular. Though it takes place a dawn and I don’t know if I’m gonna want to be up that early.” Jack rose and refilled his coffee mug. “Daniel agreed to take the day off and go for a hike, see if we can find the source. If he wakes up, let’s plan on it. Otherwise, do as you please. Just keep your radios on and stay in touch.”

“In that case, I’m gonna go take a bath,” Sam decided. “If you were at the river, did you see any place deep enough to actually get wet, sir?”

“Oh yeah, it was plenty deep enough to get wet. It was deep enough to drown in where we were. But it went back down. If you cut a little left through the trees and then head north aways, you should easily find a spot you can dunk in.”

“I will accompany you, Majorcarter.” Teal’c rose as well.

“Great. We’ll be back in a little while then, sir.”

“Have fun.” Jack sat back down on his log with his second cup of coffee and settled in to wait.

* * *

As it turned out, Daniel slept the remainder of the day and straight through the night, without a single nightmare. He woke groggy, and completely disoriented, closer to noon than dawn.

“It’s about time,” Jack called as Daniel shambled toward them across the grassy verge that separated the tents from the camp fire ring. “I was just gettin’ ready to send Teal’c to the river for a bucket of water.”

“Morning, Daniel,” Sam caroled. “How ‘bout some breakfast?”

“Cofffe?” Their linguist yawned and stretched.

“Teal’c just put on a fresh pot. Would you like scrambled eggs and bacon?”

“I’d love scrambled eggs and bacon, if it didn’t come in a foil package.” Daniel gratefully took the mug Teal’c handed him. “We got any of those strawberry pop tarts left?”

“Protein too, Dr. Jackson.”

Daniel saluted with his coffee cup. “Scrambled eggs it is, Sam. Thanks.” Daniel breathed in the warm morning air and sniffed his armpits. “Bathing is definitely in order. Why did you let me sleep so long?” His gaze drifted to Jack, narrowing slightly.

“Hmmm,” Jack tilted his head, “maybe because…I didn’t want to have to deal with you?” He scratched the back of his neck. “Or do ya think maybe because it’s been two weeks since you slept?”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Sam caught Teal’c’s eye and smiled. “So, are we hiking today, or was that just a yesterday deal?”

All eyes slanted back to Daniel, who shrugged. “It’s not up to me.”

“You’re the one working here, Daniel, we’re just along for the ride. If you need to put in a few hours on the translation, maybe we could quit early today. Spend a couple hours sightseeing.”

Daniel looked around at the expectant faces. “I have everything on tape, so it’s not imperative that I work on the translation here. But I did think…” he hesitated, meeting Jack’s _I dare ya_ stare steadily. “The atmosphere might be more conducive to actually trying out my theories here.”

“You wish to experiment with the theosophical again, Daniejackson?”

“Yes, Teal’c, I do. I have enough instructions translated that I think…” he trailed off at Sam’s startled intake of breath.

“Theosophical,” Sam repeated. “As in expanding your consciousness into other realms of existence,” she said slowly. “You’re trying to do it again, on your own.”

“Way smarter than I am,” Jack mouthed, behind her back. “Took me awhile to figure that one out, Carter,” he added out loud.

“If I do it on my own, the others-“

"Won't be able to stop you," Sam supplied. "I suppose we won't' either." She gave him a hard stare and changed the subject. "The question in play right now is – are we hiking or working today?"

“It’s going to take a tremendous amount of energy to even attempt to do this, which, to be honest, I have no hope of garnering at the moment. I’ve got to resolve this nightmare thing before I can even make an attempt at it. Let’s hike.”

“”There you have it ladies and gentleman, our agenda for the day. Breakfast, bath – I don’t want to walk anywhere near him – and then we hike.”

An hour later, all fed, bathed, and barbered they set off at a meandering pace along the bank of the river. The rough going, over rocks and cliffs faces, soon required moving inland into the pleasant shade of more tall cedars interspersed now, with gigantic redwoods. Or kin to the massive trees anyway. Their skins were darker, a reddish purple hue, not surprisingly as the planet seemed to flaunt the entire spectrum of purples in its foliage, as well as the night sky and even some of the fauna they’d glimpsed.

Lilac crested birds, looking more suited to a tropical climate than the forested terrain, flittered between branches over their heads, witttering and twittering among themselves as if marking SG-1’s progress.

Their passage was marked by unseen eyes as well, though no flutter of wings nor even a breath of premonition presaged the advance guard.

“Daniel,” Jack called ahead, glancing over his shoulder at Carter and Teal’c slip sliding down the back slope of the fern dell he was passing through. “How much farther?”

“No idea,” Daniel’s voice drifted back. He was out of sight, having already scaled the incline on the other side of the fragrant glade.

Jack stopped to wait for their companions, inhaling the scent of the crushed ferns as he adjusted his cap. “We’re going to have to turn back soon. I don’t want to be stuck out here for the night without any gear.”

“Why not?” Teal’c inquired. “We are as secure here as in the temple gardens. We have slept upon the ground previously.”

Jack eyed the alien askance. “Not when we don’t have to.”

“Indeed,” Teal’c inclined his head in acquiescence.

SG-1 was used to hiking, but several hours in pursuit of the source, as Daniel kept referring to it, had begun to dull the fun. Unless they were looping, which Jack’s sense of direction told him was highly unlikely, they had a long hike back to look forward to when they finally stopped.

“Daniel!” Jack shouted. He closed his eyes and breathed in the fresh, aromatic perfume. “Anybody else getting high off that smell?”

When he opened his eyes, Carter was bending down with a small pair of shears cutting clippings to stuff in a specimen bag.

“This could be a natural stimulant, sir. We should probably get out of here, since we have no idea what kind of side effects it might have on us.”

“Like weed, Carter? Take an extra batch home.” Jack inhaled deeply. “Daniel?” This time he clicked his radio as he turned to move forward.

Teal’c was two strides ahead of him. “Danieljackson has responded to neither call, O’Neill.”

“Funny you should mention that, I was just noticing that myself.”

The trio broke into a jog, covering the hundred yards or so of the glen in quick strides.

They broke from the cover of the trees to find Daniel was a fair distance ahead of them, trotting himself, toward what looked like a village of sorts to Jack.

“It appears we have been traveling on a parallel course to a well-used path. It could affect the time required to return to camp.”

“Good.” Jack was at once relieved and pissed. He tried his radio again, in case something in the glade had caused the crackling interference. “Daniel, if you can hear me, acknowledge.”

Nothing.

“DANIEL!” he bellowed.

“Danieljackson!” Teal’c shouted in unison.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Jack snarled, picking up the pace instantly.

They were far enough behind they would never reach him before Daniel, who gave no indication of having heard them, reached the village Jack could just make out in the distance, especially as Daniel was now running too.

And then there were people pouring out onto the forest path that led into the village. Jack pulled ahead of Carter and even Teal’c, desperation – and perhaps the fern glade – lending wings to his old knees and aching back.

Inexplicably, several yards ahead, O’Neill’s pace slowed for a few feet, then quickened again. Teal’c sensed, rather than saw, astonishment blossom in the colonel. It pulsed along the etheric thread as though kindled by inexplicable elation.

Danieljackson throbbed with waves of joy as well. He appeared to stumble forward haltingly as he threw wide his arms and then as though a puppet master commanded his strings, his arms were flung into the air as he whirled in a tight circle.

“O’Neill!” Teal’c thundered.

“It’s Skaara!” Jack flung over his shoulder. The shouts of the excited villagers – _they come, they come_ – drew Jack on like Dorothy to Oz.

Sam shared a bewildered glance with the Jaffa, but gamely matched his speed as Teal’c lengthened his stride.

Daniel was radiant; she might have said glowing if she hadn’t been frightened by the strange irrational behavior of both men.

O’Neill, as if he’d covered the half mile distance by magic, was turning in a circle as well, though after a first wild swipe through the air, his hands returned to rest on his P-90. But he was grinning and jabbering at the space around him as though possessed.

“Holy Hannah,” Sam panted, trying to match the Jaffa stride for stride. “Do you suppose those ferns have done something to them?”

“I do not believe so, Majorcarter,” Teal’c answered easily, slowing to a lope again. A prickle of awareness swept over him, pushing enlightenment along the etheric thread. “There is more here than meets the eye.”

“What?” Sam demanded, thankfully easing back to a trot. They were still a quarter mile from the bare stretch of path that led through an empty clearing back into woods on the other side.

“I believe the Abydonians may be visiting.” Teal’c slowed their gait to a walk, allowing Majorcarter to regain her breath, though his announcement had snatched it away again.

Her mouth dropped open in a manner highly reminiscent of Danieljackson.

“Come on, come on!” O’Neill hailed them, obviously unaware they did not see his compatriots.

Shifu, watching the reunion with no small amount of joy himself, saw the dilemma. The Ancient genes O’Neill carried gave him an edge, and of course his mother’s husband had been one of them. He lifted a hand, and like Brigadoon appearing from the mists, the temporary village and its inhabitants materialized in front of Teal’c and Sam as they strode up.

Sam’s mouth snapped shut, only to open again with an excited whoop. “Skaara! Shifu! Bolah!” She laughed with glee, turning in a circle herself as she took them all in. “You’re all here! Every one of you!”

“Tobay,” Teal’c inclined his head. “It is good to see you once again.

“I told you Dan-yel promised to watch over and protect us,” the villager who had lost his life in the initial ground attack mounted by Anubis’ Jaffa announced with pride. They had not encountered him in the brief moments Oma had allowed them with the lost village prior to their return through the Stargate.

“It is my very great pleasure to stand corrected.” Teal’c bowed fluidly to the young man.

Danieljackson stood to one side, so absorbed in his beautiful wife the rest of them might not have existed for him. In his mind’s eye, Teal’c saw the young man holding up his wife, the pair of them whirling euphorically.  
  
O’Neill stood surrounded by the laughing cadre of young men dancing gleefully around him.

“I am sorry, O’Neeir, that you cannot touch us.”

“”S’okay, you’re here, I can see you!” The grin pulling at his cheekbones felt unfamiliar. Jerking a chin over his shoulder, Jack addressed Kasuf, who stood at the back of the merry band, smiling broadly, and also watching his daughter and good son. “But why can Daniel touch you?”

“Because he is one of us,” Skaara chortled merrily, preempting his father. “Come, come!” He threw an arm over his head, indicating the center of the transitory village.

Kasuf merely smiled wider.

“Come! We will feed you nectar of the gods! Come,” Skaara danced ahead, continuing to beckon the crowd to follow. “Come, O’Neill. You must meet my wife and daughter. We have been waiting as children for the pleasure of your company! Come, come!”

“Because he’s one of you?” Jack followed, motioning Carter and Teal’c to join him as well, though three pairs of eyes followed the couple disappearing back into the woods.

Shifu appeared next to Jack. “He was one of us,” the gentle-eyed young man qualified. “He yet retains enough of the core to be able to touch us.”

His fingers brushed the colonel’s sleeve and in the middle of Jack’s indignant sputter, Daniel’s peace flooded over him again, effectively dousing the last of yesterday’s anger. The memories retreated once more, as though the river mist enshrouded his secrets, hiding them from further prying eyes.

The colonel stopped in his tracks, his head whipping around to the source of his new disquieting quiet.

“It is a gift for my mother’s husband, Colonel, I do not require thanks.” Shifu’s round face twitched with humor as he dipped his chin briefly before lengthening his stride in order to catch up with his laughing uncle.

Skaara continued to call encouragement as more and more villagers crowded into the common area in the middle of the tent village.

“But…” Jack looked over his shoulder at the empty edge of the woods.

“We cannot make his choices for him, O’Neill.” Teal’c moved forward.

Carter met his gaze, her eyes wide with questions he had no answers for. “No,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t do that to us…would he?”

“That’s some powerful incentive out there in the woods with him right now. I hope he doesn’t get an ascended case of poison ivy.” Jack put his boots in gear. Carter followed.

In the woods, Sha’re captured Daniel’s hands laughingly. “Come, let me take you to the healing waters. There is much I wish to share with you.”

Daniel let her entwine their fingers and pull him through the knee deep ferns growing in the deep shade of the interlaced cedars towering over their heads.

He needed to stop and breathe. It was nothing short of miraculous to be holding her hand, following her through the woods, appreciatively watching the enticing sway of the Abydonian garment, laced high under the bosom, and pulled up above her knees just now to give her freedom of movement. He was still in shock.

Though no flora bent beneath her sandal-shod feet, the ferns released their fragrance as she passed, enveloping Daniel in a cloud of sensual fragrance that stoked flaring passion.

He shook his head, trying to clear it, wondering if he was dreaming again, though the very opposition of this dream to the nightmares haunting him, suggested reality – of a sort at least.

As usual the questions were queuing up like soldiers falling into rank. “Sha’re, how? Did I…did we…were you…” Coming so fast and furiously he couldn’t get one out completely before the next was tripping off his tongue. Daniel stumbled over his feet and his words, righting himself when she paused to look impishly over her shoulder at him.

An index finger touched his lips. “Does it matter, husband?” she asked mischievously, dark eyes dancing as she drank in his beloved face.

For a moment Daniel stared at her, then shook his head again. “No. No, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does not,” she agreed, pulling him onward, flitting beneath overhanging limbs, pushing through branches blocking their way. “But soon you will know, Dan-yel. Soon,” she promised and Daniel simply gave himself up to the pleasure of the warmth of her hand in his, the view of her delicious backside scooting around massive tree trunks. He was so intent on memorizing every line of her, every lithe movement, the sound of falling water failed to penetrate his consciousness until they burst through the trees onto a cliff overlooking an unfurling emerald lake fed by three walls of immense, thundering waterfalls.

The source, he realized, noting the dam constructed to appear as if nature herself had designed and built it. Somewhere there had to be a gate that opened every morning, probably mechanized by some Ancient design and still working smoothly who knew how many eons later.

Daniel pulled them both back when Sha’re would have drawn him to the very edge. The untamed habitat sang in his head as passion sang in harmony in his blood, a heady duet as his wife tumbled with him to the grass. They rolled over and over laughing like children, though Daniel retained enough awareness to keep them well away from the edge.

Sha’re stilled in his arms, her hands framing his face as she rolled over on top of him, her weight insubstantial though she lay half astride him. “Husband, will you join with me?”

Clothes, glasses, sandals and boots were suddenly in a heap, heated bodies pressed together with the urgency of lovers long separated. Tongues met, hands splayed, hard met yielding, pleasure flared into fire trailing down soft parts, sparking embers to flame higher than the trees standing silent sentinel over the love being made on the carpet of needles softened by sun and rain for just this moment in time.

Daniel gathered the gift that was his wife into his arms, holding her against his heart, soaking up her smell, the imprint of her body on his, and realized he missed the beat of her heart. They were still separated, though realities separated them now, instead of death. The goal he had set for himself gained yet more urgency.

Sha’re pushed off his chest, her magnificent body gilded by the late afternoon light so she glowed not only from within, but without as well.

Daniel smiled and pushed back the cloud of hair falling over her face. “I love you.”

Her answering smile unlocked something deep in his chest he hadn’t been aware he’d forgotten. He immediately realized why the memories of that year had been purposely locked away. The vibrancy and vitality of those recollections, in contrast with the recovered memories from after Sha’re’s death made his life look like an old black and white movie, complete with wavering threads marring the purity of the picture.

“Dan-yel, I have missed you. Your love has reached me beyond the grave. It has followed me into eternity. But it is not yet our time again. You do not belong solely to me.” Sha’re laid a feather light hand on his chest. “In your heart you know this.” She shushed him when he would have protested. “You must follow your path until it joins again with the Great Path. I have seen your destiny. You must embrace it, heart of my heart, and in time, we will be together again.”

“My destiny is to be with you. I must stop Anubis, but then…then I will be with you forever. I will learn from the temple, how to do this, and then I will find you again.”

Sha’re smoothed the wildly tumbled hair back off his forehead. “I also long for this day when our love is joined forever, my husband, but you must leave this place and forget the temple. All the elders could not extinguish the light of the evil one. They stopped you because he would have killed your light and taken the essence of you into himself.” She kissed him lightly, though her tone was dark. “You do not recognize…” A frown creased her lovely brow, drawing together the dark eyebrows. “I do not know how this expression is spoken in your language,” she said, and proceeded to murmur it in Abydonian, before kissing him again.

Word for word, Daniel translated it as what a tasty morsel you are. The linguist, without effort, reframed even as he rolled his wife over again and proceeded to show her what a tasty morsel she was. More loosely translated, she’d been trying to tell him that his goodness, coupled with his ascended powers, would have been irresistible to Anubis.

What she did not say, but his never quiet mind continued to process, was that the half-ascended Goa’uld might have used his essence to complete the transformation.

Shock stilled his hands, nearly stopping his heart. In his arrogance, he’d offered himself up as a host. _Forever._

Sha’re’s hands came up to frame his face. “Not arrogance,” she said softly, using his words before lapsing back into Abydonian. The single word she added translated as both _innocence and purity._ “It is still this way with you, do you see? You must follow _your path_ , my Dan-yel. The path you chose when you chose reunion with those you love in this realm. It is right and good that you do so.”

“Sha’re—“

But she kissed him again, swallowing his continued objections as she began to glow softly. “Will you join with me in this form, husband?” Her face hovered above his own, the outline of her softening as the glow spread down her limbs.

_When the mind is enlightened, the body is no longer required,_ a quiet voice from out of the past reminded him. Daniel closed his eyes and opened his hands, consciously loosening the ties to his mortal form.

A solid thwack, like the thump of a fist against a closed door, made him smile. Sha’re’s glowing form touched the etheric thread lightly, so it shone brilliantly for a moment, then quietly dimmed. If fate required that he return to the physical shell, it would be waiting for him on his return; if not, then his choice was made.

She poured herself into him, reawakening his essence, bathing it with the balm of her presence, the oil of her passion. There was no thought, no feeling per se, just being. But in the being was a consummation of physical desire that so surpassed any earthly joining it could have powered unnumbered ‘gate dialings.

Daniel lay on his side, his wife in arms, sometime later, indistinctly aware that his skin felt too tight, too confining, wondering if there’d been fireworks in the sky over their heads; or if their impromptu bed bore scorch marks. He nuzzled her hair, consciousness imparting a sense of time and its passage.

He understood he could not accompany her. Though understanding in no way diminished the keen edge of longing.

Sha’re turned, pressing her lush form against him, twining her arms about his neck. “Our time out of time wanes like sands through the glass. We must return, husband.”

He did not demur. Parting – again – was a sorrow he did not know if he could bear. He sensed the urgency in her, though, and understood that their time out of time was stolen, that somewhere, on some other plane of existence, a diversion was reaching its limits.

Lingering merely further weighted down the heavy burden.

Daniel found himself tying his boots at the edge of the forest, in full view of the tent village, though no one was in sight. He rose and reached for Sha’re’s hand. “Thank you.” His throat constricted and he wrapped her tightly in his arms, letting his soul convey what words could not.

“I will await you on the Great Path, my Dan-yel. We _will_ be together again.” Unshed tears glistened in her bright eyes. “I have seen this; I know it to be true also.”

“I will count the heartbeats until that time.”

“Ahhh…” Sha’re smiled and touched his heart. “But they will be as nothing compared to our eternity. Come, the others await us.”

Daniel felt the etheric thread open again and made an effort to infuse his sorrow with a measure of happiness as well. And then there was no sorrow in him, but only light and warmth and immeasurable, incredulous joy from his teammates.

Like hammer blows it struck him they’d been panicked that he would chose to leave them again; the infusion of concern and caring needed no translation. He lifted his eyes, saw the tall form of his wife’s son striding toward them, and the second blow struck with the precision of a master blacksmith.

He had lost nothing; they would _all_ be with him.

Forever.

_When the mind is enlightened, the spirit is free, the body matters not._

He’d have to work on Jack a little more, but eventually, somewhere, somehow, he would have _all_ his loved ones with him.

Shifu was smiling, a wide face-splitting grin that also managed to look a little smug. “You look well loved, mother.”

Sha’re extended a hand and pulled his forehead down to kiss him as he fell in step with them. “You are more naughty than I imagined, my son. Do not let Skaara see this side of you or you will both be in trouble,” she admonished.

Unfazed, Shifu captured her hand and swung it between them. “Your husband looks well loved too.” He twitched a spray of needles from her hair, laughing.

“How did you find her, Shifu?”

“As you had come to surmise, Oma had hidden my mother well, but I am flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone. Oma could not deny me. When you placed your knowing within me, before you left, I became aware of the fire of my mother’s spirit. She was bound, still, to the Goa’uld. Oma did not believe you could free her without releasing Amonet as well.”

“Shifu,” his mother warned softly. “You stray too close to the edge.”

“I am not Skaara, mother, I am bound to the etheric.”

“They will punish you.”

The young man shrugged and squeezed the hand he held. “Perhaps. But they cannot take my memories, nor make me flesh and blood. They do not have that power over me.”

It was odd, a sort of déjà vu in reverse. He _had_ looked for her! The knowing, though there was no memory, filled Daniel with satisfaction. He had not abandoned Sha’re any more than he’d abandoned Jack.

“I found her only recently, and we came here directly. We have waited, impatiently, as Skaara has been declaiming loudly, for you to hear our call.”

“The debrief. Teal’c remembering Kheb.”

They were entering the Abydonian tent village, making their way to the open central area where SG-1 and the villagers sat around a cold fire.

“Yes,” Shifu admitted. “We were able to reach you through Teal’c. For a Jaffa, he is very close to illumination. And he no longer carries the evil within. It will be but a step for him when he chooses.”

“’Bout time.” Jack made a show of ripping back the velco on his Chrono as he rose. He did a double take before turning to look at Carter. “What time do you have?” It wasn’t a question, it was a command.

Sam obediently pulled back the velcro on her watch as well. “Uh, don’t know. My watch has stopped, sir; it still says 13 hundred hours.”

Jack glanced overhead where a bright white sun, hazed by a puffy lavender cloud, shone down from the 1:00 o’clock position. He checked his watch again.

“Time is relative, is it not, O’Neill,” Skaara offered gleefully.

“And fleeting,” Shifu reminded, releasing his mother’s hand as they stopped at the outer edge of the group. “We must let them go.”

Juggling weapons, Sam and Teal’c also stood.

“We do have a long hike back,” Sam sighed.

“You are aware, Daniel,” Shifu lifted a hand, as if to stay their imminent departure. “My mother was being instructed as the seer for her tribe before she was taken by the Goa’uld?”

“Yes, I remember that,” Daniel squeezed Sha’re’s hand.

“These things do not change between realms of existence. While we search for our lost ones, my mother fills this role. She has told you true, but what she does not know and cannot see, yet, is your memories of your time ascended, Daniel, are sealed against another.” His gaze slid briefly to Sam who blinked at him in confusion. “Trouble yourself no longer about what was or what well be. What is is most important. Within you is the capacity to trust. Trust that what you need, when you need it, will be there.”

Jack frowned. This was getting a little too Oma-ish for his comfort. Daniel had made his choice and they were taking him home. Jack was anxious to be on the way, before someone changed his mind. Not that anyone ever changed Daniel’s mind, but Jack had no intention of this being the first time.

“Great advice,” he clapped his hands. “And what needs to happen right now is we need to get on down the road, kids. It was great seein’ you folks.” He smiled around the circle of faces as he backed out of the group. “So glad we had this little time together.”

As he spoke he was herding his people toward the head of the path, not quite forcing Sha’re and Daniel apart, but edging toward it.

“Hope you’ll invite us over again. But we really gotta go, boys and girls. It’s gonna be dark before we get home and you never know what might lurk in those woods.” He nudged Daniel’s shoulder and jerked his head toward the trail. “What was that, Carter?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Come on, if you’re gonna say it, say it loud enough for everyone to hear.”

“I said,” Carter raised her voice, glowering at him. “Lions and tigers and bears, oh no!” She turned to obey the silent order to get on down the road, muttering a belated, and rather insubordinate, “Sir,” under her breath.

The crowd sluiced open, lining both sides of the path so she passed through a gauntlet of farewells, though the feeling of being hemmed in was purely in her head. The air displacement of the many reaching hands had to be all in her mind too. Despite her mind, she let go of the P-90 slung around her neck and lifted open palms to meet the displaced air.

The colonel resettled his hat as he reached the end and turned to watch as first Teal’c, hands behind his back, head bowing right and left, exited the passage, then Sha’re and Daniel.

“Ma’am,” Jack borrowed a Teal’c mannerism, inclining his head to Sha’re. His voice held more fervency than Carter or Teal’c had heard in it, in more than a year. “Thank you.”

Sha’re reached out a hand, touching his cheek though Jack felt only a whisper of air; reminding him again of Oma DeSala. “He is mine, O’Neill, for forever, but I will loan him to you for this little while. Know this; he goes with you of his own free will. I do not compel him.”

Jack only smiled back, though he breathed a little more easily. Inclining his head again, he nodded for Teal’c and Carter to drift, giving the pair some privacy for their goodbyes.

“That was…not what I was expecting to happen today.” Jack forced his gaze down the path.

“I had no expectations of enjoying the hospitality of the Abydonian’s again in this life time either, O’Neill,” Teal’c essayed, elevating an eyebrow as if the statement required emphasis.

Sam, unable to help herself, looked over her shoulder, her heart leaping joyfully at the sight of Daniel’s hand sliding out of Sha’re’s, his feet moving down the path toward them. “He’s coming,” she announced.

“So, you okay with this?” Jack asked as Daniel joined them.

For a moment, Daniel looked pensive, as if trying to recall something. “Somewhere, in one of my journals, I ran across something I’d written shortly after Sha’re and Skaara were taken…”

“Oh!” Sam exclaimed. “Was it – _‘Sha’re is gone_ , Jack says we’ll find her’,” she quoted softly. “’ _If anyone can, he can’_? I remember reading that years ago, while we were packing up your apartment when that sea monster alien … Nem?... kidnapped you and we thought you were dead!” A major in the US Air Force did not shed girly tears; especially not two days in a row, and not over her teammates! She sniffed them back, surreptitiously swiping her sleeve across her eyes.

“That’s the one. Think I was worried about getting paid in that particular passage as well.”

“I didn’t find her, Daniel. You did.”

“Shifu did, actually. And then she found me - or rather - us. I have closure, but I also have a new beginning.” Daniel started down the trail, but glanced over his shoulder with an unusually bright smile. “Sha’re left me with a final gift.” His hands gestured toward his head. “She reordered all the jumbled memories so I know who I am, I know what I have to do and I know I have the resources – you guys in particular – to accomplish what I have to do.”

There was a spring in his step that had missing for several years.

“So, in answer to your question, Jack, yes, I’m gonna be okay.”

Jack darted a quick corner-of-the-eye glance at their etheric thread and noted, complacently, it was glowing again. A faint gold color, but now it was sheathed in an ethereal white as well.

Maybe being hardwired wasn’t so bad after all.

“So, can we go home now? To real beds and showers? Since, you know, you don’t have to worry anymore about taking on that oily-skinned, over-the-top, cliché bad guy?”

Daniel just shook his head.

They were twenty minutes down the well-marked trail when he felt Jack suddenly stop behind him. “Wait up, guys,” he called ahead as he turned around. “What now?”

Jack snugged his PO-90 under his arm and drew down his sunglasses to look over the tops. “Did she by any chance snip the hotline to the nightmares while she was in there? _All_ the nightmares?” he asked hopefully.

For a moment, Daniel just looked blank, then shook his head again. “Wouldn’t that be nice.”

 

~*~

  
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